Democracy Now! stories, posts and pages that relate to the National Security Agency, including interviews with NSA whistleblowers William Binney, Thomas Drake and Russell Tice as well as reporter Glenn Greenwald who exposed the secret PRISM spy operation.

Newly declassified documents reveal that an active member of Students for a Democratic Society and Port Militarization Resistance in Washington state was actually an informant for the US military. The man everyone knew as "John Jacob" was in fact John Towery, a member of the Force Protection Service at Fort Lewis. The military’s role in the spying raises questions about possibly illegal activity. The Posse Comitatus law bars...

We speak with Thomas Tamm, the man who blew the whistle on the Bush administration’s secret domestic surveillance program. Tamm worked as an attorney at the Justice Department when he leaked the story to the New York Times in 2004. In 2007, the FBI raided his home and seized three computers and personal files. He still faces possible arrest for disclosing classified secrets. [includes rush transcript]

We speak to attorney and blogger Glenn Greenwald about how the Department of Justice has demanded the dismissal of a lawsuit brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation based on "state secrets" and "sovereign immunity." Greenwald says the "sovereign immunity" claim is "of breathtaking scope — never before advanced even by the Bush administration — that the PATRIOT Act bars any lawsuits of any...

The whistleblower behind the exposure of the Bush administration’s domestic spy program has revealed his identity. In an interview with Newsweek, former Justice Department official Thomas Tamm says he personally called the New York Times from a Washington, D.C. subway pay phone in 2004 to tell them about the program. Tamm was working as an attorney in the Justice Department’s Office of Intelligence Policy and Review. The secretive unit...

The Bush administration’s wiretapping program has come under new scrutiny this week. Two influential congressional committees have opened probes into allegations US intelligence spied on the phone calls of American military personnel, journalists and aid workers in Iraq. We speak to James Bamford about the NSA’s spying on Americans, the agency’s failings pre-9/11 and the ties between NSA and the nation’s...

Salon.com has published new details about a top secret government database that might be at the heart of the Bush administration’s domestic spying operations. The database is known as "Main Core." It reportedly collects and stores vast amounts of personal and financial data about millions of Americans. Some former US officials believe that "Main Core" may have been used by the National Security Agency to determine who...

The Senate is expected to vote on a controversial measure to amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act tomorrow. The legislation would rewrite the nation’s surveillance laws and authorize the National Security Agency’s secret program of warrantless wiretapping. We speak with Mark Klein, a technician with AT&T for over twenty-two years. In 2006 Klein leaked internal AT&T documents that revealed the company had set up a...

In a national broadcast exclusive, we speak with New York Times reporter Eric Lichtblau about his new book, Bush’s Law: The Remaking of American Justice. Lichtblau won the Pulitzer Prize for exposing the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program in December 2005. He reveals the inside story of the New York Times’s decision to delay publication of the story for more than a year after intense lobbying from the White...

Attorneys and writers Glenn Greenwald and Marjorie Cohn join Democracy Now! for the hour to discuss warrantless spying, torture, the Iraq War and the future of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. Greenwald is a blogger at Salon.com and author of "A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency." Marjorie Cohn is president of the National Lawyers Guild and author of "Cowboy Republic: Six Ways the Bush...

Mike McConnell, the man President Bush tapped to replace John Negroponte as National Intelligence Director, has been a leading figure in outsourcing U.S. intelligence operations to private industry. McConnell is a former director of the National Security Agency and the current director of defense programs at Booz Allen. We take a look at McConnell and the privatization of intelligence with journalist Tim Shorrock. [includes rush transcript]

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